Any museum exhibition that even hints at celebrating debauchery is welcome in my book. At the time of this writing, American culture has sustained a “No-Fun Zone” mentality for at least a decade. I’m not naïve enough to expect outright fun in any museum, but there’s no reason exhibitions can’t be titillating, even sleazy. Museums themselves, however, seem dead set on convincing the public of how fun and carefree they are through a glut of programming like Teens’ Night, yoga classes, dance performances, and concerts. These programs are often hosted directly inside, and thus interrupt, the galleries. Designed to give the impression of “accessibility,” these programs can’t disguise the reality that museums are perpetually stern institutions. Museums are largely about propriety. I accept that – I’m an adult.
There is no horror quite like organized fun. Admittedly, my thirst for anything remotely stimulating has sometimes led me to initially qualify things as good in the negative: this TV show wasn’t as preachy as it could’ve been, that movie wasn’t as predictable as most movies lately, etc. When I heard that Judy Pfaff had an exhibition in Florida, about Florida, I had every reason to be primed to enjoy it.
It turns out Pfaff has a history with Florida; in particular: Sarasota. Known primarily for her engulfing multimedia installations, Judy Pfaff has worked as a prominent visual artist for over fifty years. In 1981, she had her first solo museum exhibition at the John and Marble Ringling Museum of Art. Just over a decade ago, she was invited back to Sarasota by the educational program ARTmuse. This program was created by the Sarasota Art Museum’s founders as an embryonic platform for what would ultimately become the brick-and-mortar museum itself. Things have come full circle as Pfaff has an exhibition up at the Sarasota Art Museum titled Picking Up the Pieces.
The exhibition is divided into two rooms. The first contains the most vibrant work and the least like installation. While they have oblong shapes, flex in multiple directions, and even reach out towards the viewer, each artwork is discernably contained. It isn’t that hard to figure out where one ends and the other begins. “My mind is wired as a painter,” Pfaff admits, and that primary sensibility is on display here.
Multiple panels line the wall of various shapes and sizes. They all appear to be made of acrylic. Some are intrinsically pigmented, others superficially by staining the surface with resin. Most of these panels have “limbs” that extend outward, complicating their initial flatness. These extensions are mostly welded steel lines that blossom into other forms: more panels, crescent shapes for leaves, tubes of neon twisting jaggedly. The long arm of Alexander Calder can’t be ignored. Flashes of Frank Stella blink within these works, too. Specifically, Stella’s wall sculptures that seem equally inspired by fluorescent lighting, the Art Deco revival of the 1980s, and cocaine.
Regardless of how saturated and active these panels are, they all maintain a degree of translucency. Some light can pass through, some sections disguise themselves against the supporting wall, some areas let you see yourself looking at them. Moments like these are reminders that the materials here aren’t actually moving, aren’t really fluid, aren’t truly alive, but are entirely fake.
In fact, Pfaff’s work relishes in all things fake. This is a key point that isn’t directly addressed in the supporting text. There’s no question that, “Pfaff’s impressions of Florida’s sun-soaked, life-affirming landscape, fecund nature, and leisurely rhythm of life,” are presented. There are “…a plethora of readymade faux flowers, fruits, and vegetables…and three-dimensional elements that resemble flora and foliage,” all over these galleries. However, that’s only half right. There should be more emphasis on the word “faux,” as I see Pfaff’s work as a celebration of Florida’s evident natural life and obvious affinity for the artificial. That is Florida’s power: the cheap but seamless harmony of the natural and the synthetic worlds; a shotgun wedding between the Jurassic and the plastic.
This unorthodox synthesis is evident in this room’s only free-standing sculptures. In the center, a long table extends diagonally across the gallery next to a lawn chair. Or, it used to be a lawn chair. The tight network of warp and weft has become just the slightest bit molten, the littlest bit loose. Now, the plastic strings are frozen in limbo: a permanent refractory period. The table itself is smeared with detritus. Before the viewer lies an opulent spread of fake deserts, plastic bags, half-drunk cocktails, fabric flowers, and neon lights, all entombed in goo. Neon is a sharp analogy to Florida, as neon is a natural element but registers as otherworldly and disposable: hypnotic garbage.
As fun as these works are, they are often too literal. Fake fruits and fake flowers are used to represent…Florida’s real fruits and real flowers? That’s a bit too on the nose for me. Other works, like the two-panel pieces on the righthand wall, entertain more subtlety. The first, measuring at about 3’ x 3’, is an orange panel erupting into circular steel shapes. Lacing those shapes are small lights that blink in a gentle rhythm akin to Christmas lights. This all reads like flowers and bees without literally being those things. It’s also one of the pieces with the darkest color palettes: could those lights be little stars? The piece is backlit with surreal blue and green lights that recall a gas station at night. The panel piece to its right is a larger rug with a multicolored neon light zipping through it like a waterslide.
With all this activity, one almost misses the rug-turned-tablecloth that flows off the table at almost completely ninety- degrees. Itself covered in resin, it looks like roadkill in the final stages of rigor mortis, or a stray sock in a teenage boy’s room. One can hear the sound it would make if it fell on the floor. Across the gallery, another rug undulates like a tongue as it belches a small meal of plastic margarita glasses.
All these are richer strategies than “cocktail glasses to represent cocktail glasses.” Still, the work encapsulates Pfaff’s acute sense of the fun, futureless frivolity of Florida. This state is the perpetual butt of cheap jokes and single-minded analyses: heralded as a bastion of freedom and family values, derided from afar as “America’s dick,” or grimly presented as the canary in the coal mine of right-wing fascism and censorship that’s ready at a moment’s notice to leap onto the country writ large.
Florida is much richer and dumber than all that. It’s a place of off-season carnivals, dinosaurs past their prime, strip malls, strip clubs, loose morals, endless lawsuits, lush landscape, low taxes, low education, violent storms, finger foods, and the brisk exchange of fluids. The weather is nice, and the people are mean. It values transience and expedience: cheap thrills year-round. Obviously, this means no community, no history and no future, and absolutely no real obligations. That’s not exactly a role model. But what history matters in a place so relentlessly present? What future could ever happen in a state that is designed with no attention span? That has one season? Whose main business is tourism: strangers leaving just as quickly as they came? Pfaff astutely and lovingly distills Florida’s Multiple Personality Disorder into more digestible forms without reducing its amusement and frustration.
One gleans quite a different reading from the exhibition documents and the title itself, Picking Up the Pieces. Both the title of the exhibit and the title of a large-scale installation in the second room, refer to Hurricane Ian. According to the museum text, Picking Up the Pieces is inspired by, “Hurricane Ian’s devastating impact on southwestern Florida in September 2022.” The text continues to correctly describe Hurricane Ian’s “bewildering chaos and tumult” and the “indelible mark” it left in its “aftermath.” Some of this aftermath is presented in a video projection that accompanies the installation. Pfaff herself bore witness to Ian’s “destructive power” at Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Island.
Words like these are apt descriptions of the damage caused by Hurricane Ian. What’s less apt is the implied equivalence between the somber memories of Hurricane Ian and the experience of Pfaff’s work here. Yes, twisted metal, pools of plastic, flying panels, and shorn fabric abound. Random objects from drinking glasses, neon lights, seashells, and honeycomb cardboard stock are married by the stirring forces of wind and flood. Natural disasters make their own mixed media installations out of our lives. Pfaff communicates that point well enough.
The issue is that Pfaff’s work just isn’t that sad. She may have felt sadness seeing what Hurricane Ian left behind – who wouldn’t? – but that’s her business. Sorrow is not evident in these galleries. But the supporting text and the dismal documentary-style of the video imply a mournful experience that just isn’t there, and a degree of chaos when the work is usually quite prim, for better or worse.
That said, the second room is notably more muted in color. Starburst candy colors are out, and the paler shades of taupe, beige, and grey are in. Largely, this is the result of a material swap: cardboard, polyurethane foam, concrete slabs, aged wood, and a monochromatic video dominate this room. There are still colored acrylic panels and neon lights, but they’re accents against a quieter backdrop. Speaking of backdrops, the room’s architecture lends to this new atmosphere. Instead of having the titanium white gallery walls of the first room, the second room exposes the weathered bricks of the original building, a former high school. These bricks, in their smeared glory, contribute heavily to the industrial, nautical feeling of the gallery. Dimmed lights allow viewers to see the video projection, obviously, but also induce a hush.
The centerpiece is a large installation of steel pipes, stone, colored panels, LED light strips, and sailboats suspended mid-air. They don’t move, but you can. Viewers can walk through this space, around these objects and their various harnessing apparatuses, to get the simulated, safer, lower-resolution experience that they’re in the eye of the hurricane. A single skylight window beams down soft, natural light roughly in the installation’s center. The power cords of the LED strips, the unnatural light in the room, are disguised, hilariously, by flooring tape with a “wood floor” image on their backside. Some large strips of that same tape are slapped against the gallery walls where their camouflage does them less good.
Again, where’s the doom and gloom? Viewers are impressed by this installation, not depressed. “How did they get these pieces in here?” “How do they all stay still?” “Who could think of this?” “Why is this so fun?” These are a few of the questions I overheard other visitors compelled to ask out loud. Some visitors preoccupied themselves with the logistics of how it was assembled, a common and distracting Achielle’s heel of most installation art. Many people, however, easily let go of those questions and drifted off into the museum VR-experience of matter swirling around them. My personal favorite of these Twister floating objects are the sunflowers and their towering stalks sealed in intergalactic platinum paint.
Well, if you don’t find sadness in this exhibit yourself, it’ll be handed to you. Opposite the installation is a large wall with a projected video. This video documents various sites of the destruction of Hurricane Ian from the vantage point of a car window. Collapsed buildings, enormous boats slammed into one another, long stretches of land filled with scrap: all presented in black and white, in case you didn’t register how solemn this is supposed to be. This is a flimsy juxtaposition to the vibrance and Fantasia-style animation of dead objects in the rest of the gallery. It’s a needless bummer. Presumably, the viewer is supposed to interpret this pairing as evidence of the exhibition’s sophisticated duality: holding the vividness and pleasure of the natural world with its hazardous potential for carnage. How mature.
This just belies Pfaff’s organic interests and the obvious effects of her work. It’s just as useless to insist on even a shred of this exhibit being mournful as it is to insist on Goya being happy-go-lucky. Quieter, yes. In fact, the artwork lining the walls surrounding the installation are some of the best works by Judy Pfaff that I’ve ever seen. On the left, two enormous wall pieces comingle cardboard, foam, and metal until they look like mutated hornet’s nests. When you get closer, the layering of colors, adjustments from gloss to matte, and degrees of opacity are so rich that they deserve the same reverent vocabulary used to describe oil painting. The porous cardboard stock rhymes nicely with the aforementioned sunflowers.
On the back wall, a horizontal steel frame acts as the skeleton for a billowing mass of plastic. It reads almost like a color spectrum, beginning on the left with some green and deep blues, transforming into violet and red, and then evaporating into translucency. A select amount of LED and neon lights breathe the most tender amount of life into this rubble. Beneath the circulating web of plastic neurons is the cortex: a multicolored disco ball. Despite the mass of material blocking out much of its already faint light, it spins faithfully: beaming out whatever signal it can.
The wall closest to the video projection holds a similar sculpture. This time, there’s no color: just steel, a white LED light, and translucent plastic. No disco ball, either. Unlike its sister sculpture, this one appears devoid of life. Backlit by the sterile white LED light, it suspends like a ghost waiting to cross over. Or maybe that’s pessimistic: what if its blankness isn’t the end of life, but the beginning, like a stem cell?
Underneath that is a large display of objects not dissimilar from the sordid table in the first room. This piece is more securely (i.e. more conservatively) positioned near a wall against which a large LED light projects. It appears to be a slab of concrete coated with foam tinted in various shades of blue, resin, seashells, plants, and dilapidated pottery. Both the seashells and the plastic twinkle as one walks by. Small orifices gape while masses of urethane foam crest and rock, all giving the appearance of a seafloor caught in the moment where the current stops just before shifting directions.
In my mind, these artworks display the most technical acumen and emotional resonance of the work on view. That said, their resonance is not that potent. If there’s any sadness in this exhibition, it’s the realization that the work isn’t as loose or audacious as their initial jolt suggests. After the sugar rush comes the crash. Granted, it’s not a major crash, there’s interesting and fun artwork here, but there is a noticeable dip in enthusiasm once one takes a second lap through the galleries.
While Pfaff’s piquant visual interests are obvious, so is her ultimate conventionalism. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but the brashness of the work ques the viewer up for an experience that is, frankly, rather innocuous. Just as exotic sea life and reptiles flaunt vibrant colors and dizzying patterns to signal danger, I wish these works had more of the venom I felt they promised me. Alas, I left the gallery not sucking out the symbolic poison or asking a loved one to urinate on my metaphorical jellyfish sting.
Picking Up the Pieces has the distinct feeling of butterflies in one’s stomach as they get ready for a party – the imagined possibilities of laughter, music, dancing, getting buzzed, getting laid, blowing off steam. Then, they get to the party and it’s just a little smaller, just a little quieter, the lights a little too bright, the decor a little too neat, the conversations a little stiff, the people a little more sober than one had hoped, the specter of etiquette hiding just behind the door.
The exhibition Judy Pfaff: Picking Up the Pieces is on view at the Sarasota Art Museum in Sarasota, Florida, through Sunday, March 24, 2024.
Bay Art Files contributor Jonathan Talit is an artist currently based in Orlando. He received his BFA from Boston University and recently received his MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa. He makes sculptures, essays, exhibitions, friends, fun, and occasionally money.
Over the past decade, immersive art has grown from a niche market to mainstream popularity, much to the delight or disgust of many in the art world. From rotating projections of Starry Night to Meow Wolf’s growing repertoire, an increasing number of mainstream audiences are engaging with this medium. As it grows, we are challenged to define it, evaluate it, and integrate it into our own arts communities. Tampa Bay is eager to join the conversation—and has a lot to offer to it—with an array of examples from our own past, present, and future.
Immersive Art and its Origins
To discuss immersive art, we first need a definition: Generally, immersive art is an embodied, 360-degree experience where the boundary between “viewer” and “art” is dissolved through active participation and multi-sensory engagement. Primarily rooted in the visual arts, other disciplines including theatre, music, story-telling, film/video, dance, fashion, and culinary arts may play a role. Many definitions out there cite virtual reality, video projection, and laser light shows, but that only represents one approach; immersive art may also be created from more tactile, traditional processes.
“Immersive art…has a simple definition—it’s the creation of a world around the person in a way that makes them feel part of and inside of it. In practice, the label of immersive art touches on everything from illusory world-building to simply including a piece of interactivity within a larger, traditional art show. The true meaning of immersive art is somewhere between those two things…[it] must create something that moves beyond the fourth wall…bringing viewers into the art and augmenting their reality.”1
Immersive art seeks to demolish the division between capital-A “Art” and life, and between art object and viewer, but the concept behind this 21st-century trend is nothing new. Throughout history and around the globe, more often than not, art and life have been deeply integrated. For example, among the thousands of cultural groups across the vast continent of Africa—such as the Yoruba, Igbo, and Dogon people—visual, performance, and literary arts are inseparable from each other and from the participatory ceremonies they accompany. (For this reason, it is absurd to display them as stand-alone “art” objects in Western museums.)
Such ceremonial markers of holidays and life’s milestones are—in Western terms—interdisciplinary, embodied art experiences. These events incorporate community members to such a degree that there is no distinguishing lexicon for “art” as a stand-alone concept in many global languages. Hand-crafted objects, costuming, music, food and drink, spoken word, dance, and theater are combined together and imbued with symbolism to create authentic, transformative experiences for participants. There is no line between “art” and “audience” because the participation of all parties is a fundamental element.2 We must acknowledge the deep history and global presence of this approach to the “arts,” lest we support the false narrative that it is a contemporary, Western invention.
Art, That’s Immersive
The canon of Eurocentric Art History includes early examples of immersive or experiential art occurring in more traditional museum and gallery settings:
Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds, first exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City in 1966, lives on in contemporary iterations. The gallery is filled with rectangular metallic silver balloons that reflect the environment around them and belie their hefty appearance to float whimsically from floor to ceiling. Viewers are invited to walk amongst them and touch them, their movements becoming an integral element of the artwork.3
In 1971, Robert Morris filled the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) sculpture hall with “interactive sculptures that would experiment with conceptions about sculptural space and human physicality by having museum-goers put their own bodies to the test.” Minimalist sculptural objects such as ramps, cylinders, and beams were transformed into useful objects, emphasizing the viewers’ interactions with them as the “art,” and the sculptures as a tool to achieve an embodied aesthetic experience.4
The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, first completed in 1971, is an octagonal brick building with a skylight, containing 14 murals by Mark Rothko in varying shades of black. It is “a spiritual space, a forum for world leaders, a place for solitude and gathering. It’s an epicenter for civil rights activists, a quiet disruption, a stillness that moves.”5 Its somber interior is designed to engulf the viewer and foster deeper contemplation. In the words of Tampa-based artist and educator Noelle Mason, Rothko Chapel is “immersive but not entertaining.”6
Yayoi Kusama has become a global sensation for her polka-dotted infinity rooms, including the 2018 exhibition Love is Calling at the Tampa Museum of Art (heralded by Tampa Bay Times as “incredibly Instagram-able.”7) But the 93-year-old artist has been making viewer-interactive artwork since 1966, when she was banned from performing with her controversial work Narcissus Garden at the Venice Biennale: Kusama, dressed in a kimono, sold the mirrored vinyl balls that comprised the installation to passersby for 2 dollars each, a critique of the commercialization of art.8
James Turrell’s “skyspaces,” a series initiated in 1973, feature an “aperture cut into the roof of a building that causes the visible plane of the sky to appear flat at the level of the opening.” They encourage experiential interaction by the viewer and a suspension of time and space.9 One of these—Joseph’s Coat—is installed at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota.
Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds (2010) consists of a pile of millions of unique handcrafted porcelain sunflower seed replicas on which the public is encouraged to walk. This interaction symbolizes the “complex exchanges between the one and the many.”10
A recent example is Ernesto Neto’s SunForceOceanLife (2021), a “hand-crocheted, walkable maze of yellow, orange, and green threads that stretch 79 feet across the gallery and spiral 12 feet in the air.”11 This joyful piece turns museum-goers from passive observers into active playmates, all inside of the austere white box of the gallery.
Self-Identified “Immersive Art Experiences”
The name most likely to draw recognition of the immersive-art-experience world is Meow Wolf. The group started as a grassroots team of outcasts from the Santa Fe, NM arts scene who turned a rented warehouse into a punk art space in 2008. They opened their first permanent immersive art installation, House of Eternal Return, in 2016, drawing 400,000 visitors—almost six times the population of Santa Fe—that year alone.12 Their rapid success drew the attention of investors and they’ve been growing since, with installations Omega Mart (Las Vegas, NV) and Convergence Station (Denver, CO) opening in 2021, and plans to expand to Grapevine, TX in 2023 and Houston, TX in 2024.13
Meow Wolf pioneered a new kind of attraction somewhere in the gray area between art and entertainment. Visitors create their own non-linear journey through a space where everything can be touched and the narrative is unclear. I have yet to visit any of Meow Wolf’s installations myself, so I can’t speak directly to them, but what seems to set them apart from a mainstream attraction like Disney World is their subversive edge, layered conceptual foundation, and eccentric aesthetic. Some in the art world have rejected their work as art, but cofounder Sean Di Ianni says, “We consider what we do to be art—very much. But if the art world doesn’t like that, that’s fine.”14
Since Meow Wolf’s meteoric rise, a number of permanent immersive arts attractions have cropped up around the country and globally, including AREA15 in Las Vegas, NV (which houses Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart, and will open another location in Orlando, FL in 2024); Superblue and Artechouse in Miami, FL; Seismique in Houston, TX; Otherworld in Colombus, OH; Wisdome LA in Los Angeles, CA; teamLab experiences in Shanghai, Tokyo, and Macau, Japan; and Atelier des Lumières in Paris, France.15 It’s fair to say we are well past “trend” territory and well into an art/entertainment hybrid discipline to be reckoned with. Tampa Bay is in on it, too, with Fairgrounds St. Pete opening in December 2021, and Crab Devil’s The Peninsularium slated for 2022. (More on them, soon.)
Fairgrounds St. Pete, St. Petersburg, Florida. Photo credit: Copyright Fairgrounds St. Pete
Recent History of Immersive Art in Tampa Bay
I reached out to leaders in Tampa Bay’s art community to hear their thoughts on immersive art in general and the medium’s history and presence in the region. Though the first “true” permanent immersive art attraction opened in 2021 (Fairgrounds St. Pete), there is a long precedent of immersive, interactive, and experiential art in Tampa Bay worth noting.
One of the first names that came to mind for many was the Vinik Family Foundation, which brought the above-mentioned Yayoi Kusama installation to the Tampa Museum of Art in 2018. They also presented the popular installation TheBeach Tampa by Snarkitecture at Amelie Arena in 2016. The massive venue featured a “15,000-square-foot immersive environment featuring an “ocean” of 1.2 million recyclable and antimicrobial white balls” and was open to the public free of cost. This whimsical installation inspired joy for visitors of all ages and backgrounds.16
Earlier this year, the Vinik Family Foundation brought Lucy Sparrow’s Tampa Fresh Foods to Water Street. Sparrow’s “grocery store” was filled with over 50,000 handmade felt replicas of common consumable products. Gallery attendants became supermarket associates and Sparrow herself manned the register. Outfitted with shopping baskets, visitors could buy reasonably priced artwork/products, the proceeds of which benefitted the local nonprofits Feeding Tampa Bay and Tampa Arts Alliance.17
Walking into Tampa Fresh Foods, I instantly had a smile on my face—it was pure delight. Coke, ketchup, tampons, and shrimp smiled back at you from the shelves. I must have walked down each aisle ten times, each time seeing something new and remarking to a stranger, “Did you see the green onions?!” For me, the installation was successful beyond pure entertainment because, on closer inspection, it subversively critiqued advertising, excess, over-consumption, waste, and the paradox of choice.Even if you didn’t read into it on that level, it brought a bunch of strangers into a space to smile and laugh together, and that’s something.
One of my favorite examples of Tampa’s immersive-art past is The Music Box: Tampa Bay, created in 2016 in Mann-Wagnon Park in Sulphur Springs along the Hillsborough River. Commissioned by the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) in partnership with Community Stepping Stones and curated by Sarah Howard (Curator of Public Art and Social Practice, USF), The Music Box: Tampa Bay followed in the footsteps of the first installation of The Music Box in New Orleans in 2011, a concept for musical architecture developed by New Orleans Airlift (NOA) and artist Swoon. National and local artists and students used reclaimed materials from the site to build sound-producing structures that grew into a musical village. For a month in 2016, the site was programmed with free cultural events, including musical performances, artist talks, historical talks about the history of Sulphur Springs, jam sessions, open mic nights, and yoga. Visitors were invited to open play days where they could make their own sounds and interact with the site.18
When I spoke with Sarah Howard about immersive art and what makes a work successful, she identified qualities that I believe The Music Box: Tampa Bay achieved: It sparked joy and a sense of wonder, created a common space for all to access and play, built common ground that spans all identities, and spurred action on otherwise difficult-to-tackle issues.19 I also appreciate that this project integrated the existing community where it was sited, brought together national and local artists, and worked across disciplines and generations to create a space where everyone felt included and welcomed.
My interviewees cited a number of less-well-documented examples, as well:
Devon Brady, CEO of Crab Devil, cited Mac Wellman’s play Bad Penny, performed on the banks of the Hillsborough River; the annual Gala Corina art fair in the early 2000s; and exhibitions in the 90s and 2000s by Experimental Skeleton, in which Brady took part.20
Howard mentioned curator Dave Hickey’s Ultralounge: The Return of Social Space at USFCAM in 2000, where the gallery was transformed into a nightclub lounge.19
Tracy Midulla, Founder and Director of Tempus Projects, included in this list the gallery’s 2014 film and projection exhibition The Room is Empty; Benjamin Zellmer Bellas’ self-explanatory A 1993 Mercedes-Benz Is Filled with Sequins and Flipped Over onto Its Roof by Millennials, curated by Parallelogram for Coco Hunday; and Meg Leary’s Ride of the Valkyries, curated by Cunsthaus, featuring flying hairdryers and live opera singing.21
Surely, the eclectic list could go on, but I include these examples here to illustrate the historic swell that has developed into the recent wave of immersive art spaces in Tampa Bay.
Permanent Immersive Art Attractions in Tampa Bay
The first permanent self-identified “immersive art attraction” in Tampa Bay is Fairgrounds St. Pete, which opened in December 2021 and is located in St. Pete’s Warehouse Arts District. They’ve commissioned over 60 artists to collaborate in creating a “choose-your-own experience destination” integrating artwork with “layers of experiential innovation, using technology creatively to drive interactivity and immersive gaming.”22 Fairgrounds St. Pete emphasizes play as an entry point to the underlying narrative of their Florida-centric installation, which may be investigated as deeply as each guest desires.
Fairgrounds St. Pete, St. Petersburg, Florida. Photo credit: Copyright Fairgrounds St. Pete
I was quick to become a Fairgrounds St. Pete Immersive member in 2021 and was among the first groups of guests to visit, and have been back since. The adventure begins in a throwback Florida motel lobby with no clear roadmap on where to head next (intentionally!). I took the route of focusing on the artistic aspects, wandering through each room, appreciating the aesthetics of it all and dissecting concepts behind the artwork. I’ve never been much of a gamer, but I watched those around me enthusiastically search for clues and discover hidden codes to trigger actions, such as an epic Everglades thunderstorm on the 50-foot projection screen (collaboration with Olivia Sebeskey). Fairgrounds St. Pete’s creative approach to gamifying the space is likely a strong entry point for many, though, for me, I was happy to explore it more like an art gallery.
A few installations, in particular, stand out to me: First, Mike Hicks’ A Mysterious Portal to the Bay. I almost walked past the small, dark niche toward the back of the building, but when I noticed it and walked up, I couldn’t pull myself away. It’s a quiet and unassuming installation depicting a bridge underpass that appears to extend miles into the distance over a body of water toward a city skyline. The gently ebbing water glints with blue light and creates a soft splashing sound over muffled cars passing above. It transports you, and that makes for a great piece of art.
Strawberry Room by Macy Eats Paint and Emiliano Settecasi, St. Petersburg, Florida. Photo Credit: Copyright Fairgrounds St. Pete
I also love the Strawberry Room by Macy Eats Paint and Emiliano Settecasi, for very different reasons. It’s sweet and delightful and hits a “critical mass” (as we say in the art world) of charming strawberry cuteness. It’s adorable, but also seductive and a bit hedonistic. It’s that little bit of edge that pushes it to another level, enticing you to plunder a decadent strawberry cupcake off the neat little dessert cart and scarf it down in three indulgent bites. (But don’t, it’s sculpture.)
Electric Sky Lounge by Neil Mendoza, St. Petersburg, Florida. Photo Credit: Copyright Fairgrounds St. Pete
Electric Sky Lounge, which opened in March 2022 and features work by Neil Mendoza, is another stand-out for me. Hand-turned cranks control 3D-printed hands that exist seamlessly both as physical objects and digital images on the screens in front of them. You have full control over the hands’ simple movements, which impact cute and irreverently funny animations of animals: You can pet a shedding dog, smash a chicken, or upend a floating duck. Mendoza’s work awakened the gamer in me.
Cultural Currency by Illsol and New Roots Art Collective, mural installed on the exterior of one of Crab Devil’s shipping container installations at The Peninsularium, Tampa, Florida. Photo Credit: Copyright Crab Devil
Tampa Bay’s next permanent immersive art attraction will be Crab Devil’s The Peninsularium, expected to open in 2022 in the Ybor Heights neighborhood of Tampa.* The Peninsularium starts in a reimagined Florida Bait Shop and continues on to a maze of 25+ shipping containers, each holding an artist-made, Florida-inspired installation; a subtle but discoverable overarching narrative lies below the surface. Crab Devil CEO Devon Brady writes:
“We want our viewers to be surprised by what they see, but we want the mechanisms by which that sense of surprise is achieved to be discoverable to the engaged viewer, and for that knowledge to give them a greater insight and appreciation for the real-world magic that surrounds us all the time. We like to bring the viewer in on the secret—to show them what we like to call “the artifacts of artifice.” We want our experiences to have depth—for them to reveal their secrets on both micro and macro levels.”20
This intention is evident in the “preview” installations that Crab Devil has presented at Tampa events in the past couple years—Munchausen Waves at the 2021 Gasparilla Music Festival and The Bait Ball at Gasparilla Festival of the Arts earlier this year, both created by Devon Brady. Munchausen Waves is a kinetic sculpture and overhead shade structure inspired by a “Renaissance-era theatrical illusion developed by Italian stage illusionist Nicola Sabbatini.” It uses basic mechanics and mathematical synchronization to produce an optical illusion of an undulating wave-like surface.23 On one side, the discs are painted shades of red, orange, and yellow, evoking fire or the sun. On the other side, the discs are shades of blue and green, referencing water or the sky. The billowing colors are both calming and menacing, but you can also focus your eye—the way you would on a single blade of a fan—to see the simple composition behind the magical visual effect.
The Bait Ball is housed in a 40-foot shipping container, like many of the installations at The Peninsularium will be. Guests enter to find themselves inside a cage-like steel structure lined with illuminated kelp. On one end, a tiny peephole invites a look inside a miniature diorama depicting an underwater scene (by artist Phil Roach). On the other end, a round steel ball holding a grid of white fish begins to spin. The fish start to blur just as a strobe light turns on, transforming their blurred movement into a 3D zoetrope—out of nowhere, the fish appear to be swimming in a continuous circulating motion. Before you can pull your jaw off the floor, the strobe light turns off and the mechanics of the illusion are again revealed.24 As with Munchausen Waves, the curtain is pulled back, and what you see there only makes the work that much more compelling. Crab Devil approaches immersive art with tactile materials and analog technologies blended with media arts and modern technologies. I look forward to experiencing the completed attraction.
Recreating Historical Art as Immersive
I’ve encountered a range of skepticism on the subject of immersive art, but one common enemy seems to emerge: Immersive Van Gogh, and its contemporaries (immersive Monet, Kahlo, Klimt, etc.). Their primary offenses include: 1. The artist whose work is featured did not intend it to be presented that way (i.e. they’re all dead), 2. The physical medium in which the artist originally created their work is central to its significance (i.e. the fact that it’s a painting is fundamental), and 3. They are geared toward consumptive entertainment rather than thoughtful contemplation or meaningful experience. But, they are also a part of the region’s immersive art experience “scene” and demand inclusion.
Beyond Van Gogh Sarasota, Florida. Photo credit: Jessica Todd
The art world’s palpable disdain for these kinds of attractions meant only one thing: I had to go and see for myself. So, I mustered all of my judgment-withholding strength and set off to see Beyond Van Gogh Sarasota and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition. At a ticket price of $55.99, Beyond Van Gogh Sarasota (produced by Paquin Entertainment Group and Normal Studio), is located in a massive white tent in an empty field adjacent to the University Town Center Mall parking lot. Inside, the self-guided tour begins with an illuminated biographical timeline and information about Van Gogh’s work. A small room of colorful lights is the precursor to the main event: A 30,000-square-foot room with a 35-minute loop of wall and floor projections of Van Gogh’s work, sprinkled with historical quotes and photographs set to instrumental music and the occasional voiceover. Visitors seemed conscientious in reading about Van Gogh’s life and work, and gazed attentively—necks craned—at the kinetic animations of his famous paintings.
Beyond Van Gogh Sarasota, Florida. Photo credit: Jessica ToddBeyond Van Gogh Sarasota, Florida. Photo credit: Jessica ToddBeyond Van Gogh Sarasota, Florida Photo credit: Jessica Todd
It was pretty, I’ll give them that—a fantastic choice for a Tinder profile picture background. But the wobbling projections and bold aesthetic choices on behalf of the creators were distracting for me. The animators made the sky swirl—an obvious choice—but also cut-and-pasted flowers from one painting over another, created an odd patchwork-quilt grid of Van Gogh’s signature, flew birds across skies, walked figures across city blocks, and superimposed slowly disintegrating paintings on top of each other as a transition effect. As Noelle Mason pointed out in our conversation back in April, the whole point of Van Gogh’s paintings is that they were paintings—his brushstrokes defied their static permanence and came to life on their own, without the assistance of an app.6Beyond Van Gogh didn’t foster a deeper understanding or appreciation for me. In fact, it was a bit sad, having seen his work in person. Sorry, Van Gogh, capitalism did you dirty on this one.
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition. Photo credit: Jessica Todd
At Westshore Mall in Tampa, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition (produced by SEE Global Entertainment and Bridgeman Images) is a few storefronts down from Selfie Wrld Tampa (perhaps the perfect Influencer one-stop-shop?). The familiar scent of Auntie Annie’s pretzels wafts through the air as you enter the gutted Sears department store. It’s a vibe. Inside, for a $22.60 ticket, you find larger-than-life prints of Michelangelo’s famed frescoes accompanied by informational text and a self-directed audio guide. Where Beyond Van Gogh focuses on an aesthetic experience, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel seems more focused on education. (To be fair, it isn’t advertised as “immersive,” but the terms “360-degree” and “experience” are used in their advertising.) The prints were a bit pixelated and the stained mall carpeting a bit depressing, but the text and audio information were thorough. The attraction was quite well-attended for noon on a weekday, mostly older folks but some young people, too. It was better than I anticipated, but in a different way.
Perhaps the question here is not, “What is the quality of the experience?” but, “What would the visitors be doing if they weren’t here?” Getting thousands of people to spend an hour or so learning about Art History before heading off to the food court is a major feat, one that museums struggle to accomplish. The popular, commercial aspect of these attractions provides access. As a reviewer of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel says, “We may never make it to Rome so this was a good substitute for us.” Or for others, it can be an inspiration—one Facebook user writes, “The bucket list now contains the yearning to see the real thing.”
Another gem Noelle Mason shared with me was that the (actual) Sistine Chapel is an immersive space and it was built so that everything around you inspires awe.6 This is absolutely true, and cathedrals, mosques, and other religious spaces may very well be the “OG” permanent immersive art spaces. The Sistine Chapel undoubtedly holds the potential to be an awe-inspiring space. But it’s worth noting that I went to the Sistine Chapel in my early 20s: My neck bent up toward the ceiling, shoulder-to-shoulder in a crowd of sweaty tourists while guards screamed, “Foto NO,” every three seconds when someone snapped an unauthorized picture—I don’t think this was Michelangelo’s vision either.
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition. Photo credit: Jessica Todd
The lesson here, and perhaps the lesson for all contemporary immersive art spaces, is that you can’t force an “experience” on anyone. You can facilitate it, but experiences have to happen to you. A few weeks after that visit to the Sistine Chapel, I remember wandering into a little-known, mostly empty cathedral in Spain on an arbitrary Thursday evening. The golden-hour sun set the stained-glass windows ablaze and the gilded alter aglow, and the rehearsing choir echoed in the nave. Out of nowhere, I had an immersive arts experience, one I can remember far more vividly than many of the famous landmarks I visited. Perhaps one of the people I walked past in Westshore Mall, with its chipped tile and faint mildew scent, plastic audio guide pressed to their ear, staring on at Adam’s pixelated finger, had an experience. Who am I to judge?
Evaluating Immersive Art
Perhaps due to our global histories of these kinds of experiences, a major strength of immersive art is its accessibility. For many, an art museum is simply not welcoming: A chilly white room with signs reading “Do Not Touch,” a uniformed guard shushing, plaques with big words and old dates, accessed through an epic stone façade. It screams, “Not for everyone.” Immersive art asks you to touch, encourages photos, induces laughter, and speaks through entertainment instead of academics. It is familiar and democratized, providing more inclusive access to the arts, at least on a psychological level. (Ticket prices are sometimes quite high and can become a barrier to access.)
Larger audiences bring more money—and we all know funding to be the Achilles heel of the art world. What’s not to like about that? It’s worth noting here that immersive art experiences seem to be most popular in the heavily commercialized parts of the world: the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan. They can be money-makers, and that brings with it a focus on marketing, social media, and entertainment. The work may become too palatable, shifting the role of the artist from culture-maker to content creator.
I have yet to find an article written about immersive art that does not include the mention of Instagram or selfies. Is this a symptom of the immersive art-beast, or simply a sign of the times? We’ve all seen the Darwin Awards-esque news stories about people being gored by wild animals or plummeting from cliffs while trying to snap envy-inducing photos; we’ve read about natural wonders destroyed by hordes of selfie-takers. Perhaps in the 2020s any awe-inspiring visual scene will be reduced to influencer content to some degree.
Should immersive art welcome the free publicity? On the positive side, it increases revenue to the often-underfunded creative sector, and it bolsters access to art for those who feel excluded by high-brow galleries and museums. Or, should we admonish the dumbing down and corporatization of one of humanity’s greatest intellectual and cultural pursuits? Rather than conclude in strict “yes” or “no” answers, these questions can instead prompt thoughtful exploration into the intentions and outcomes of immersive art projects.
“True immersive art experiences ask us to use something called narrative transport. This is the idea of losing yourself in a story or getting caught up in one. When narrative transport is used properly, one of the values of the immersive experience is that it imparts a more profound meaning to the participant through use of kinetic sympathy, or accessing emotions by interacting with something. When narrative transport is used for something else—like advertising—it cheapens the whole label of immersive.”1
When it comes to art in any form, I’m a believer that all of it is valuable in its own way. Whether it’s a paint-by-numbers kit or an elaborate full-length opera, it’s all good for something. However, I also believe in applying a critical eye to the arts for the sake of education and advancement. As we develop the canon of 21st-century immersive art, we must also develop a rubric and language for evaluating it. What makes a high-quality immersive art experience? How does it move beyond superficial awe and photo backdrops to become transformative, profound, and intellectually challenging?
“We cannot resurrect the old system of art. Nor can we simply wish away the break that split apart the old system of art, arrogating intellect, imagination, and grace to fine art and disparaging craft and popular culture as the realm of mere technique, utility, entertainment, and profit. Like other dualisms that have plagued our culture, the divisions of the fine art system can only be transcended through a continuing struggle.”25
Just as in other art disciplines, evaluation investigates form and function: High-quality craftsmanship and technique, appealing aesthetics achieved through principles of design, compelling storylines, and a cohesive concept that is legible to the viewer are fundamental components of a successful work of art. Work should build upon historical references in innovative ways while contributing to contemporary conversations. Great artwork suspends time, stirs emotion, makes you view the world differently, and stays with you for years to come. Evaluating art of any kind is, of course, highly subjective, but the exercise is nonetheless important.
Conclusion
As much as immersive art experiences are enjoying a rise in popularity, they are also subject to a great deal of skepticism—from the general public due to their unconventionality, and from the art world due to their popular appeal. As Sarah Howard pointed out to me, this is not unlike any other medium of art experiencing a new rise in popularity: It took photographers decades to be considered artists; digital art wasn’t taken seriously until the 2010s; and today, we raise an eyebrow at NFTs. The immersive art field has a long road ahead to prove its chops and lower eyebrows, but I believe Tampa Bay has the talent and grit to take it on.
Thank you to the arts and culture leaders in the Tampa Bay community who took the time to speak with me on this topic: Janine Awai, Crab Reckoner at Crab Devil; Devon Brady, CEO of Crab Devil; the team at Fairgrounds St. Pete; Sarah Howard, Curator of Public Art and Social Practice for the Institute for Research in Art at the University of South Florida (USF); Noelle Mason, artist and professor at USF; and Tracy Midulla, Director of Tempus Projects. Learn more about Fairgrounds St. Pete at https://fairgrounds.art and Crab Devil at https://crabdevil.com.
*Note from the author: In full disclosure, I have been a part-time staff member of Crab Devil since January 2022. This article was written from my personal perspective—sparked by the cropping up of immersive experiences in the Tampa Bay region—and does not represent the viewpoints of any of my employers, past or present.
Jessica Todd is a writer, curator, artist, and arts administrator based in Tampa, FL. She is the Development Coordinator for Tempus Projects and the Administrative Coordinator for Crab Devil. Jess is passionate about building the creative infrastructures that support artists and arts organizations, as well as studying and addressing issues of equity, access, and inclusion in the arts. Prior to moving to Tampa in 2020, she was the Residency Manager at the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, FL for six years. She holds a BA in Metal Art & Technology from Penn State University and an MFA in Jewelry/Metals from Kent State University.
Jacqueline Chanda. “A Theoretical Basis for Non-Western Art History Instruction.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 27, no. 3 (1993): 73–84, https://doi.org/10.2307/3333249.
David Clowney, “A Third System of the Arts? An Exploration of Some Ideas from Larry Shiner’s The Invention of Art: A Cultural History,” Contemporary Aesthetics, vol. 6 (2008), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7523862.0006.004.
Installation shot of Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott with 1919 (1980) on the left. All photographs courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted.
Establishing the Sarasota Art Museum was a lengthy process that began back in 2003. After two years of speaking with community leaders in the arts and education sectors, the Sarasota Art Museum joined forces with Ringling College of Art + Design. Their decision? To transform the historic 1926 Sarasota High School into an art museumand education space. The school was originally designed by M. Leo Elliott but features a mid-century addendum created in 1959 by Paul Rudolph, an architect whose influence is still seen today in Sarasota. In 1996, classes officially moved to the current Sarasota High School, leaving the previous building abandoned for nearly 20 years. There were talks of demolishing the building until thirteen Sarasota volunteers, partnered with the Ringling College of Art + Design, petitioned for it to be transformed into an art museum.
The Sarasota School Board unanimously awarded them the building in 2004. From there, years of rigorous fundraising were required to begin renovations on the building. Over $22 million was raised by 2014. In 2015, they brought on Anne-Marie Russell to serve as founding executive director and chief curator, a position she held for six years. Russell oversaw the final renovations, the museum opening in December of 2019, as well as exhibitions and other programming through 2022. This includes Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott.
1919, 1980, Acrylic on Canvas.
The first painting in the Robert Colescott exhibition is the first thing on most of our minds lately: America. Regardless of one’s political position, it is difficult not to see events in our country over the past few years as anything other than grim, claustrophobic, and without clear resolution. 1919 (1980), Colescott’s painting of the continental United States of America, presents our massive and varied slab of land, still curiously bound together somehow, at least on a map. The rendering of this map is not bleak and dreary, however, but throbbing with vivid technicolor. Each state is granted its own color that is different from the surrounding states, emphasizing contrast. Some states are stamped with images symbolic of their culture: an alligator in Florida, a bottle of wine in California, an ox skeleton in Nevada, charmingly rendered. The map is flanked by two figures in profile who are only visible from the chest up. The rest of their bodies are submerged in a billowy mass of cotton-candy clouds, sprinkled with “studio sweepings” like cigarette butts and opened cans. The figure on the left is a white woman, hilariously buxom, and the figure on the right is a Black man in uniform. Evidently, these are the artist’s parents, who are also symbolized in the bird’s nest image in the center of the painting.
There are a lot of tropes here: 19th-century silhouettes in the figures in profile, state symbols on children’s maps, the “melting pot” of America formed by distinct cultures, and the latent but potent tension between Black men and white women in our country. 1919 certainly taps into the unsightly race relations that helped form and maintain the U.S. but it’s with a light touch. As the exhibition progresses, Colescott becomes increasingly direct about his positions regarding race, the history of painting, and American popular culture. This cocktail of uncomfortable social commentary, crude figuration, and a lush color palette is Colescott’s modus operandi. Like Paul Mooney and Robert Crumb, Colescott aims for the status of great comedy by presenting these blunt and jagged truths with a sense of levity and even glee. Essentially, he’s his own straight man and funny man; Laurel and Hardy in one painterly package.
Installation shot of the artist’s early work.
It took a while to get there, however, and the exhibition traces Colescott’s history succinctly. Born in 1925, Colescott doesn’t develop his signature style until the 1970’s when he was well into his forties. This is peculiarly late for an artist to “find their voice,” particularly when individual styles were so prized in the mid-20th century. A room in the exhibition dedicated to Colescott’s early work presents a serious student of art history, from Manet to Matisse to Léger (a teacher of Colescott’s). These paintings are mostly executions of the styles of other artists, if not copying specific artworks altogether. One exception is a small painting, Untitled (1949), made while Colescott was a graduate student at UC, Berkeley. It’s a small work of geometric abstraction that is an early cue of Colescott’s later strategies for organizing compositions and his affinity for pink. The rest of the work documents Colescott’s attempt to find his point of view through other artists. Fake it ‘til you make it. All artists go through this, but Colescott’s lengthy growing pains risked him becoming a permanent student of art history: a practitioner of the values of others instead of synthesizing his own.
That all changes after an extended stay in Egypt beginning in 1964 where Colescott became the first artist-in-residence at the American Research Center in Cairo. It’s always a little slippery to deduce clear cause-and-effect from an artist’s life to their work, but with Colescott, it’s pretty case-closed. There is a dramatic shift in formal concerns and sensibility that result from Colescott’s five-year stint in Egypt. The paintings become larger, the colors more saturated and delicious, and the figures less realistic yet full of life somehow. Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1968) is an early example. This is the beginning of the “cartoonish” style for which Colescott is remembered. Something about Egypt awakened his childhood love of color and comic strips (I suspect Egyptian hieroglyphics and ornate linen are to credit). It’s apt that Pop Art and psychedelia were occurring simultaneously in the States and the UK while Colescott was in Egypt. The social revolution of the 1960s was also brewing, exploding into the Civil Rights Movement in America and Second Wave Feminism in the west writ large.
Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, 1968, Acrylic on Canvas.
This leads to another clear awakening for Colescott in Egypt: race. It seems that moving from the Pacific Northwest to Cairo forced Colescott to confront, accept, and celebrate his own bi-racialism. This, paired with his beatnik influence after moving to Oakland in 1969, focused Colescott to present these issues with a crass, cheeky sense of humor and almost hallucinogenic imagery. Sprinkle in some appropriation from art history and American popular culture, along with the occasional flashes of self-reflection and autobiography (see Bad Habits from 1983), and voila: you’ve got an artwork by Robert Colescott.
Colescott is extraordinarily productive once he finds his groove. The exhibition is replete with examples of Colescott keeping his basic ingredients but playing with the proportions. Cactus Jack in El Dorado (1977) amps up the transparent use of stereotypes, in images and text, but dials back the viscous painting style for which Colescott is best known. The painting’s crisp colors and flat rendering narrow the attention to Colescott’s matter-of-fact delivery of stereotypes, inducing an appropriate discomfort. Even the scenery is a stereotype of the American landscape and desire to head west.
Detail of Cactus Jack in El Dorado, 1977, Acrylic on Canvas.
Hard Hats (1987), by contrast, relishes in cloddish, lumpy figures but doesn’t reduce them to signs or stereotypes. Instead, Colescott presents a rather intimate scene of solidarity between a wife and her husband, a construction worker and his coworkers, Americans and their fellow citizens. “We’re all building this together.” While the comradery is definitely visible, so is the looming fear of collapse. Hence, the hardhats. When is this whole thing going to tumble?
Some paintings eschew any immediate story altogether. Sleeping Beauty (2002), a large diptych centrally mounted in the exhibition, appears more interested in marks rather than images. Reduced and swift, the marks made on the canvas tempt the viewer to decipher any specific reference but are ultimately illegible. The painting has a sweeping sense of time that is enhanced by its large scale. It invokes the history of recording touch, from cave paintings to Abstract Expressionism, but isn’t particularly located in the specific project of America that concerns the rest of his work.
These paintings, however, are examples of Colescott’s deep cuts. They meander slightly from his primary “one-two punch” strategy: presenting the audience with cherished imagery and symbolism that connects them to their childhoods and rosy-eyed views of America, then immediately injecting the garish, foul costs of that imagery without any clear path towards reconciliation. They get the sweet and the bitter.
Shirley Temple Black and Bill Robinson White, 1980, Acrylic on Canvas.
Or at least, that’s the goal. This “one-two punch” often consists of injecting Black figures into scenes in which they weren’t originally visible, like Rubens or Lichtenstein paintings. Sometimes Colescott is even more upfront by portraying white figures as Black and vice-versa. Shirley Temple Black and Bill Robinson White (1980) is an example. Here, the famed actor/tap dancer ambles through a garden with the iconic child star of the 1930s. It could easily be a scene from one of the several movies they made together except that 1) the scene is in color and 2) their races are switched. Colecott’s intense color palette, drenched in saturation, amplifies the feeling of disorientation. The figures, however, are some of Colescott’s most realistically rendered. The result is a painting that is acutely abnormal. Besides the disarming switch of the figures’ races, the friction between the cartoonish colors (the background sunset looks like something straight out of The Simpsons) and the more focused realism of the figures confuses fantasy and reality. Don’t movies do this, too? There’s got to be a Wizard of Oz joke deep in this painting; the double entendre of switching from black and white to color when Dorothy arrives in Oz. The painting contains a remarkable stillness, as if frozen in suspended animation. A tonal remix occurs, too. Robinson’s laughter reads more like horror and Temple’s luminous enthusiasm comes off more withholding and cautious.
Left: Bad Habits, 1983, Acrylic on Canvas. Right: The Judgement of Paris, 1984, Acrylic on Canvas
They aren’t all hits, however. The Judgement of Paris (1984) uses the same “one-two punch” but just comes off rushed. Colescott had a fine line to walk: how to employ clear strategies of appropriation but not become utterly formulaic. The Judgement of Paris wears its formula on its sleeve: steal a title and composition from a canonized painter, usually a white male, and make one or all the figures Black! That’s a fine place to start, but The Judgement of Paris doesn’t really go anywhere with it. It doesn’t transcend this formula. The paintings have to offer more than the sum of their parts, and with Colescott they usually do. If not, the humor flattens, the point is cheapened, Colescott’s hard-earned voice is lost, and the painting quickly sums itself up. Yawn.
However, the final room that contains The Judgement of Paris does present other work that successfully complicates Colescott’s practice. Colescott’s signature oeuvre relies on this “one-two punch” that the viewer, ironically, is continuously hit over the head with throughout the exhibition. The idea being that Colescott shows us what these symbols from history books, Disney movies, and magazine advertisements really mean. He, the insightful artist and enfant terrible, reveals the truth of our complicity to us. Without him, perhaps we’d be lost in our personal fantasies and delusions of grandeur; fantasies in which we’re the heroes, of course. That’s fine, but it’s just fine. The show becomes richer when Colescott points that outward perception a little closer to home, making tidy, moral judgments tougher to deliver. After all, it is his work that relies quite heavily on stereotypes, on appropriating charged imagery that already exists only to alter it slightly, if at all.
Lone Wolf Trilogy (Strutting his Stuff, Checking It Out, Yes Virginia), 1976, Graphite on Paper.
Perhaps Colescott never completely developed his own unique strategy for creating images outright. Whether it’s through Rubens or Shirley Temple, Colescott almost always needs a pre-existing vehicle through which to express his ideas and attitude. A series of drawings called Lone Wolf Trilogy (1974) makes this compromise well. Colescott steals the stereotype of a dapper, randy wolf, originally made popular by famed animator Tex Avery. With a lengthy and lascivious grin, the wolf is always standing confidently, puffing on a cigar (shout out to Freud), and dressed to the nines. In case it wasn’t already clear what the wolf is hungry for, Colescott draws an obvious dick print in the wolf’s pants. His legs spread wide exacerbate his intentions: he’s ready to deliver.
Lone Wolf in Paris, 1977, Acrylic on Canvas.
Colescott uses one of these drawings as a template for the painting Lone Wolf in Paris (1977). Here, the wolf is dancing with a blonde woman at a restaurant. Orbs of light (spotlights?) focus on the couple as the wolf dips the woman, an iconic and erotic position in salsa dancing. His once obvious erection is obscured the bent body of the woman, but sexual symbols linger. What else could those stiff candles, slowly dripping milky wax, be there for? The shadow underneath the dancers, an amalgam of intertwined forms, predicts more shapes and contortions that the dancers will take on later when they find someplace a little more private.
Of course, the wolf is Robert Colescott. Whether it’s how he saw himself, or how he wished he did, or both, who knows. Regardless, what’s successful about these drawings and the resulting painting is their sharp humor and lack of judgment. Colescott understands the pleasure of being a horndog and the resulting complications of it. It’s possible that the work in this room reveals Colescott to be even more reflective. What if stereotypes are often unfair representations with real consequences and pleasurable to slap onto others? If one needs a clear takeaway or lesson from an art exhibition (I don’t), this one offers a useful quandary: how do we attempt to make a better world for each other, whatever that means, while accepting our innate appetites to segregate and flatten each other into caricatures? What if America isn’t as pretty and fluffy as we’re sometimes told it is, but that’s because we aren’t either and never will be? Not in some high-minded, academic way, but in our tedious, daily negotiations with our egos and various thirsts?
In a culture where image management is high currency and many people, perhaps artists most egregiously, are constantly manicuring their morality on “the public stage” like a bird preens its plumage, Robert Colescott reminds us that manicures only go so far. In fact, they could even be detrimental in their disguising of the malformed and grisly impulses that run through all of us. Like all good art, Colescott’s work provides an opportunity for integration: to work on a better, more equitable world for all while acknowledging the quiet rumble in our bellies at the cheap pain of others; our animal eyes glowing in the dark.
Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott, curated by Lowery Stokes Sims, Raphaela Platow, and Matthew Weseley, was organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. The traveling exhibition is on view at the Sarasota Art Museumthrough October 31, 2021. For additional information and related programming, visit the museum’s website.
Bay Art Files contributor Jonathan Talit is an artist currently based in central Florida. He received his BFA from Boston University and recently received his MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa. He makes sculptures, essays, exhibitions, friends, fun, and occasionally money.
Recent Acquisitions from The Ringling Photography Collection
by Robin O’Dell
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly.” ― Laura Mulvey, Visual And Other Pleasures
The above quote was written in the 1970s by the noted film theorist Laura Mulvey (British, b. 1941). This idea of the “male gaze” was expanded to include all visual theories and spurred a re-evaluation of how and by whom images have been and are being made of women. Chris Jones, Curator of Photography and New Media, has culled eighteen photographs recently brought into the collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art and placed them sparingly on the walls, inviting visitors into this continuing dialogue. Small in number but large in visual delight, these photographs celebrate artists taking control of their own artistic identities.
Artists using self-portraiture include Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972). A transgender artist, Muholi uses their own image to project strength and directness, challenging the very idea of how people of color have been depicted throughout history. Muholi considers themselves a visual activist and is specifically concerned with presenting gay and LBGTQ as part of the photographic canon. In these self-portraits, Muholi’s skin is darkened to an almost pure black and the prints are large, offering a visually dramatic and physically compelling visage. Muholi’s work is immediately recognizable and wholly unforgettable.
Bea Nettles (American, born 1946) is respected for her use of experimental processes. For The Ringling, she created an image that incorporates photographs of the Museum’s environment with one of her own body to make a unique portrait. These fragments combine to layer time and place with her own distinct sense of self. The photograph is part of the series Return Trips including images of Spain and Morocco, so recognizing something so specific to this Museum offers an unexpected delight. The Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, is currently presenting a virtual retrospective of Nettles’ fifty-year career. You can access it here: https://www.eastman.org/bea-nettles-harvest-memory. It provides a good overview of this very creative and inventive artist.
In the photograph Self-Portrait with Leica twentieth-century photographer Ilse Bing (American, born Germany, 1899-1998) captures herself in the act of photographing. Using multiple mirrors, she plays with the idea of self and identity. The image shows both a frontal and side view of the artist while incorporating the Leica camera she became closely associated with. This small camera was revolutionary at the time, as most professional photographers still used box or cameras with bellows. This iconic photograph is part of a large gift of over a thousand photographs given to The Ringling by Stanton and Nancy Kaplan in 2019. Other gifts by the Kaplans in the exhibition include works by Ruth Bernhard (American, born Germany, 1905-2006) and Lotte Jacobi (American, born Prussia, 1896-1990). All three of these twentieth-century artists included in the exhibition were able to carve out noted careers, despite facing limited opportunities due to their gender. Women have actively participated in photography since its inception, yet when the history of photography was first written it was primarily male artists who filled the pages. Like in so much of Western society, women have had to steadily chip away at these constructs, often having to make their own opportunities. The bold images here testify to these artists’ skills. Bernhard, specifically, presents the female body in her own distinctive style, and Jones has selected some lesser-known, while still visually compelling, images.
The exhibition also offers some fascinating portraiture, which the Museum has purchased in the last couple of years, having made an effort to acquire photography by a variety of contemporary women artists. In her series Am I What You’re Looking For? Endia Beal (American, born 1985) takes young black women who are transitioning from college to the workplace and poses them in their own home, but in front of a generic workplace backdrop. These young women stand dressed in their workplace finest, staring into the camera with aplomb. The very act of presenting young black women within the construct of a traditionally male-dominated workplace environment heightens the understanding of how the societal norms we take for granted can be culturally biased. Likewise, Deanna Lawson (American, born 1979) carefully poses a tableau of young lovers fully clothed and embracing within a bedroom. This representation particularly elicits comparisons to the “male gaze,” as Lawson empowers the young black woman to control her own sexuality. You would think that the photograph is a spontaneous snapshot, but Lawson carefully constructs her images to intensify the overall effect. Knowing this invites the viewer to look at every detail for clues to the visual story.
Three photographs are presented from Rania Matar’s (Lebanese, born 1964) series A Girl and Her Room. Matar photographs young women in their bedrooms surrounded by the trappings of adolescence. The locations vary from Beirut, Lebanon to Winchester, Massachusetts. Seeing how each girl has dressed and decorated her room gives an almost voyeuristic glimpse into how she is materially shaping her identity. It brings to mind Sally Mann’s series At Twelve, Portraits of Young Women, not because of any visual similarity (Matar’s pictures are color and large scale), but because they also illuminate the awkward transition from child to adult, teetering on the edge of full womanhood. Matar captures the importance of the outer world to inform the inner.
Selina Román (American, b. 1978) is a Florida artist. In her series Please Disturb, she invites friends and colleagues to visit her in traditional roadside motels and participate in the creative process through the use of props and costume. In the photograph chosen for this exhibition, Solar Flare II, the glare of sunlight obscures the face of the subject. Román uses this anonymity as a force of power. “I can see you, but you can’t see me–so you don’t know what I am thinking or feeling,” she is quoted as saying in the label. As a faceless woman, you are no longer being judged by traditional standards of beauty. That, alone, is empowering.
A trip to The Ringling Museum is always a delight. And where else in the Tampa Bay area are you going to see wall-sized sensual Baroque paintings by Peter Paul Rubens (Dutch 1577-1640) in one gallery and then experience the penetrating stare of Zanele Muholi in another? And if you have enjoyed looking at women claiming their power, the exhibition Circus and Suffragists is also currently showing at The Ringling Circus Museum through February 14, 2021, and Reframed is currently on view at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts through the end of the year.
Robin O’Dell is the former Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is currently the Curator of Collections at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Tampa. In addition to curating dozens of photography exhibitions, she has written for Image Magazine, George Eastman Museum, and the Arts Coast Journal for Creative Pinellas.
